In this stimulating study, Mark Kalderon enlists the history of philosophy to pursue a philosophical end. He argues for a form of direct realism through an exploration of Aristotle's theory of color vision, as a way of “attending to the phenomena under investigation” (ix). In Kalderon's view, Aristotle is a self-conscious defender of the manifest image, in reaction to predecessors such as Empedocles and Democritus, whom we might regard as more “modern.” Examining Aristotle's response to such theories, he believes, affords us an attractive way of recapturing an alternative, “premodern” form of realism, in which colors are real, objective properties of external objects, which present themselves to us in visual awareness in such a way that we can grasp their character directly (vii, 165, 184). Kalderon sees it as closely allied to Oxford realism and its more recent descendants (xi).